“In both world wars, German apologists used the Listian notion of a global balance as a rationale for their geopolitical showdown with Britain and the rest of Europe. Uniting Europe under their hegemony, they argued, was necessary to create a counterbalance in the world to Britain and the United States. Today’s European Union, led by France and Germany together, embodies the project in a more authentically Listian form. (…) List died in 1846 – two years before Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) issued their ‘Communist Manifesto’. Few writings have ever expressed as vividly the communitarian critique of unregulated global capitalism: “[The bourgeoisie] has left no other bond between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash-payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly excesses of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in its icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation” (1). Marx’s materialist philosophy, like that of Smith and Ricardo, subordinated politics to economics and thereby denied List his nationalist remedy – that the nation state, by asserting the countervailing values of national fellowship and solidarity, could reform the faults of capitalism. So long as capitalism remained the prevailing economic form, Marx argued, national politics and culture would only reflect bourgeois dominance. Since the state was merely the “executive committee” of the bourgeoisie, no genuine national community was possible. Only after a revolution had abolished private property and social classes could the general interest of the community emerge. The traditional state would the “wither away”, and war among states would come to an end (2). Capitalism’s own fall was inevitable, Marx argued, because as a system it was not only unjust but unstable – so unstable and crisis-prone that it would ultimately self-destruct. By amassing too much capital in too few hands, it stunted demand and atrophied profits. Disaffected have-nots grew progressively more numerous, while the shrinking number of capitalists, drowning in surplus capital and therefore condemned to low returns from normal enterprise, entrapped themselves in desperate speculation (3)” [David P. Calleo, Rethinking Europe’s Future, 2001] [(1) Karl Marx Friedrich Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, New York, International Publishers, 1937 (1848) p. 11; (2) “In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.” (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ibid., p.45); (3) In various writings, Marx also stresses capitalism’s “transformation problem” as un explanation for his declining profits and instability. The use of labor-saving machinery, while it augments the “reserve army of the unemployed” and thus keeps down wages, also, by reducing the use of labor, simultaneously reduces the entrepreneur’s capacity to garner “surplus value” what labor produces over its own cost – which Marx believed is the only real source of capitalist profit. See Karl Marx’s, ‘Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, ed Friedrich Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1967; vol. 1 originally published 1867 and vol. 2 originally published 1885-1894, ch. 25)”]